People have a tendency to behave as if a thing doesn't exist if we haven't given it a name.

Think about it. There was no such thing as word processing until somebody invented the word processor. Of course, people used to create and edit documents before that but, back then, it was simply called typing.

That's why people also tend to talk about nonemployer businesses as if there weren't any before 1997, when the Census Bureau started counting them every year. So, the oldest nonemployer businesses around are supposed to be ten years old or so.

Before that, they were just small businesses. And nobody needed to care about them because no small business owner was supposed to want to stay that small.

One of the assumptions operating here is that technology was supposed to have made nonemployer business possible, and potentially viable. Before the technological advances in telecommunications and computing that took place in the 1990s, the argument that ‘there's only so much one person can get done' seemed to hold a lot of force.

Of course, it has always been true that there's only so much one person can accomplish in any 24-hour period. Technology has not changed that; it has simply changed how much qualifies as ‘so much.'